The reasons for rejections

I’m writing this at the start of my 6th week of unemployment. I had a few setbacks last week, which I want to document here.

The previous week had ended well with me passing a second round interview for a company whose UK base is just about 25 minutes’ walk from my flat. The third stage was an online personality test and as such, I was given assurance that there were no right or wrong answers.

I didn’t get a chance to take this straight away, as I had an interview booked in at a “Mary-like” airline which is only a few hundred yards further, so I wanted to do all the necessary preparation in order to give myself the best opportunity to pass the interview.

I had a bit of a ‘mare on the Monday night. Having cleared out of the bathroom in order to clean it, I brought most stuff back in. But only when I was getting out of the bath did I realise that a towel wasn’t one of them. Hurrying to get one, I slipped on a tile and fell backwards. I know I banged my elbow and I thought that was it.

On Tuesday, the day of the airline interview, the temperature suddenly soared. But I still had to wear a suit and a shirt & tie for the interview. So I was sweltering in the heat and my back had started to ache too, presumably as a result of the slip the day before. As with pretty much every interview I’ve had, we started late, but not on my account. I was met by someone from HR and escorted through the building to the HR dept and then asked to wait. I waited for about 15 minutes while being subjected to the same advert on the screen nearby over and over.

This interview turned out not to go so well, as I was rejected from it the day after. The reason given was quite bizarre. In their minds, they have a setup which requires lots of people to do very little work. For example, in my last job I would spend half a day per month doing the bank reconciliations (for about 10 different accounts), whereas they employed someone to do the bank reconciliations as their full time job. We ended up talking at cross purposes, and the senior guy there was obsessed with making an artificial distinction between financial accounting and management accounting (for those of you who aren’t accountants, the difference is that financial accounting is reporting done externally for regulatory purposes and management accounting is done for internal purposes, but for 99% of the time you do exactly the same thing for both). But this guy treated them as though they were as different as football and ballet. The fact that I wouldn’t be drawn to a preference for one over the other was interpreted as meaning I didn’t know what I wanted to do and I was rejected on that basis.

Straight after this interview, I had to go the library to do this online personality test. The format gave you three statements for each question, and you had to say which statement you agreed with the most and with you disagreed with the most. Examples included:

I like to get things done on time

I enjoy negotiating with people

I am tidy

I make decisions quickly

I do not show my emotions easily

I’ve done plenty of personality tests before and they all come out fairly similar: I’m a details man, able to spot mistakes at a very close level, but also able to see the whole picture. In terms of Myers-Briggs, I am an INTJ personality type (Introvert-iNtuitive-Thinking-Judging), which puts me in the good company of Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking, though also in the exceedingly bad company of Ayn Rand!

The important thing here is the introversion. The job required building working relationships with people and I demonstrated a past ability to do this in my previous jobs during the course of my 2 interviews. But according to the company, introverts can’t do this and I was rejected on the basis of the personality test.

But in all this, the back ache didn’t go away and I could not stop sweating. Even at night, after pouring cold water over my face, I was just radiating heat and I quickly concluded that it was more than just accident + weather making me feel unwell, I had a virus of some sort. It felt rather like flu, only I had no symptoms of a cold. So on the phone I sounded absolutely fine, you couldn’t tell anything from my voice. But if you looked at me, you’d have seen a constant sheen of sweat dripping from my face and I couldn’t walk far or fast. If I wanted to see something behind me, I couldn’t turn my neck, I’d have to shuffle my feet around to look. That knocked me out for most of the week. However, I still had another interview to attend on Thursday. What was I to do?

Well, I did what any self-respecting man would do. I got up off my sick-sofa (I’m not good at spending all day in bed) and dosed myself up on painkillers. I made it onto a train into London and was able to scout out the office where my interview would be. This was a slightly tricky task as there were 4 roads in the same area with the exact same name, all centring on a single point. It was on the 3rd of the 4 that I found it! Having done so well ahead of time, I found a seat at Victoria station and gave myself more painkillers and fever suppressants, watching the clock tick round. I’m still waiting to hear back from that interview, but considering how many drugs I’d taken; it could be a novel rejection!

I’ve been rejected from other jobs for being over-qualified, which is quite bizarre. There is still a culture in finance that people have to be ambitious and so while there was nothing in the job they felt I couldn’t do, I was told I was “unlikely to progress as quick as I might want” without actually asking me about my views on “career progression.” Everything seems geared against someone with a christian mindset like mine, where ambition, career progression and other associated connotations of materialism are shunned in favour of finding contentment and fulfilment in God.

So what other reasons/excuses are there for rejecting someone? Have you had any bad or otherwise memorable ones you’d like to share?